The problem with anyone being able to film anything is than anyone will film anything, and everyone will watch anything, and the next thing you know we're all singing Gangham Style because we have been freaking assimilated.

YouTube is banned in my house, mostly because of the racists, cat videos, and Johnny Knoxville. I don't want my kids accidentally watching 8-bit dudes snort lines of coke and and I don't want them getting any funny ideas like auditioning for Tosh.0 behind my back, so I just banned it. If you can't beat them, use your 17 years of training in the radical far right Christian patriarchy to completely eliminate them from your scope of consciousness.

The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that even if your kid doesn't own a camera or watch YouTube, someone else's kid does. And if you give a kid a dream and a camera? They're going to use it.

I actually do encourage my kids to film and make movies (my dad and I had a small videography business once upon a time) but when they were little enough to care about something other than boobies, phones didn't have cameras. Cameras were hard to come by, expensive, and cherished. They were only put in the hands of my young children with the intent. My kids had to plan out their movies, gather props, storyboard plots, and then borrow my video camera. Which meant I always knew what was happening. Which meant my kid was never going to end up on Tosh.0. WHICH IS FINE WITH ME.

Even more than encouraging my kids to make movies, I force encourage them to unplug, go outside, and play. This is honestly more for my mental health than their body fat percentages. Cooped-up kids who spend all day blowing out zombie brains eventually just beat each other to pulps, and then I have to yell, and then everyone cries, and it's just easier if they go outside to ride bikes and burn ants and blow up legos like normal kids.

This is precisely why my kids don't have smartphones yet, but they have decent BMX bikes.

But if you give a kid a BMX bike, you know what they're going to do? Yep. USE IT. By any means necessary, even if that means is a big pile of dirt right in front of the main street through your neighborhood.

(The following video is short (4 seconds), but will give you The Buttchills. Proceed with caution.)

(I only show this because he's okay.)

You know how your kid moans at you that he's dy-i-i-ing and you know in his voice that he really just has a biology quiz before you even lay an eye on him? Turns out, we have this superpower in reserve. When your kid walks in the door and says "mom?" you, from an entirely different room of the house, can hear "Mom? I did something really, really not okay to the body you slaved nine months of your life away lovingly creating, and once the shock wears off, it's going to hurt like shit".

All he had to say was Mom. I almost threw up in my mouth.

I'm no stranger to injuries. I had to carry my baby sister in one hand and the better part of her kneecap in the other through Veteran's Stadium when I was 12 years old. I've been cleaning up people's blood and puke since I was old enough to fill the mop bucket. I have two sons who have a long-documented history of getting truly ridiculous injuries like broken eyesockets and cracked skulls. My daughter has even thrown in a concussion or two, just to stay competitive. But in all my years of burnt, bloodied, and beaten bodies, I have never once had to deal with a castable break.

When I asked him to stay little forever, I didn't actually mean "Please, fracture your wrist, twice, right in the growth plates, so maybe you'll always have a wittle arm for your momma to wuv." But that's what I got. NAME YOUR TERMS CAREFULLY, MOMS AND DADS.

At first I was PISSED that his friend was being an idiot filming him being an idiot, but then I realized that getting two terrified 12 year olds to tell you WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED TO MY BABY OH MY GOD is a lot like talking to a toilet on crack cocaine, and then I realized that I didn't need them to tell me, oh hai! I could see for myself through the wonder of mobile technology. I knew it was fractured when we watched that video and hear his little bones go thwap against the asphalt.

Not five minutes later, my son asked me what I had done, because his texts were ringing off the hook. (Shut up, I don't know what you call it when a bunch of texts come in. I'm ancient.) I told him I didn't do anything (except forward it to him, duh, because seriously, YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS SHIT.) We looked at my son's friend and he just kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, um, well, maybe I sent it to some people?

And just like that, my son went viral in the middle of Hades, Arizona.

And like any good viral video, *someone* turned it into a Demotivators poster.

Which I can't stop freaking laughing about, because he's okay.

Only because he's okay.

He is okay. He has a cast for a month, which is pink because it's breast cancer awareness month and man, he loves boobies and is pretty sure getting a broken arm over fall break and a pink cast will get him loads of access to some *shudder*. He can hardly play Xbox, can't ride bikes at all, and can't even play catch with his friends anymore, which sucks for him. He also can't do laundry or take out the trash or tie his own shoes or practice the violin, which doesn't really suck for him at all. Force - Balance.

He still can't surf YouTube, though, even if he's totally on there now. Hypocrisy, thy name is Mommy Blogger.